On The Art of Reading eBook

fullest good—­
Leaving a blank instead of violins.
I say, not God Himself can make man’s
best
Without best men to help him....
’Tis God gives
skill,
But not without men’s hands:
He could not make
Antonio Stradivari’s violins
Without Antonio. Get thee to thy
easel.’

So much then for What Does: I do not depreciate
it.

X

Neither do I depreciate—­in Cambridge, save
the mark!—­What Knows. All knowledge
is venerable; and I suppose you will find the last
vindication of the scholar’s life at its baldest
in Browning’s “A Grammarian’s Funeral”:

Others mistrust and say, ’But time
escapes:
Live now or never!’
He said, ’What’s time?
Leave Now for dog and apes!
Man has Forever.’
Back to his book then; deeper drooped
his head:
Calculus racked him:
Leaden before, his eyes grew dross of
lead:
Tussis attacked him....
So, with the throttling hands of death
at strife,
Ground he at grammar;
Still, thro’ the rattle, parts of
speech were rife:
While he could stammer
He settled Hoti’s business—­let
it be!—­
Properly based Oun—­
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist
down.
Well, here’s the platform, here’s
the proper place:
Hail to your purlieus,
All ye highfliers of the feathered race,
Swallows and curlews!
Here’s the top-peak; the multitude
below
Live, for they can,
there:
This man decided not to Live but Know—­
Bury this man there.

Nevertheless Knowledge is not, cannot be, everything;
and indeed, as a matter of experience, cannot even
be counted upon to educate. Some of us have known
men of extreme learning who yet are, some of them,
uncouth in conduct, others violent and overbearing
in converse, others unfair in controversy, others
even unscrupulous in action—­men of whom
the sophist Thrasymachus in Plato’s “Republic”
may stand for the general type. Nay, some of
us will subscribe with the old schoolmaster whom I
will quote again, when he writes:

To myself personally, as an exception
to the rule that opposites attract, a very well-informed
person is an object of terror. His mind seems
to be so full of facts that you cannot, as it were,
see the wood for the trees; there is no room for perspective,
no lawns and glades for pleasure and repose, no vistas
through which to view some towering hill or elevated
temple; everything in that crowded space seems of
the same value: he speaks with no more awe
of “King Lear” than of the last Cobden
prize essay; he has swallowed them both with the same
ease, and got the facts safe in his pouch; but he has
no time to ruminate because he must still be swallowing;
nor does he seem to know what even Macbeth, with
Banquo’s murderers then at work, found leisure